


if a great wave shall fall and fall upon us all

by bryndentully



Series: S8 AUs [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Pining, R Plus L Equals J, Season/Series 08 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 10:21:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18715078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bryndentully/pseuds/bryndentully
Summary: Let them say Lady Stark died defending her people.In the crypts, Sansa tries to lay more than just the dead to rest. Set duringThe Long Night(8x03).





	if a great wave shall fall and fall upon us all

**Author's Note:**

> Still trying to get out of a writing slump. This isn't related to the first part of the series. Enjoy!

The greatest army in the world, Tyrion said. When the Dothraki arakhs flicker out, row after row, flare after flare, her jaw drops.

Sansa may be a slow learner, but she now knows danger when she sees it. She knows _catastrophe_ when she sees it.

"Get down to the crypts."

"I'm not abandoning my people," says Sansa, incredulous and choking on what she can't bring herself to say. _I'm not abandoning **you**_.

If she says that, the pin will finally drop. The world that Sansa has gained a measure of control of will spin out of her grasp and shatter.

Always the bravest between them, her sister has no such qualms.

"Take this," Arya orders, pressing a dagger into Sansa's hand without so much as a second thought. "Take this and go."

"I-I don't know how to use it," Sansa insists, clinging to the last bits of normalcy that are all but shredding in her hands. Beyond the darkness, the dead approach, a problem that is far over her head and out of her reach. She supervised all the preparation. Organized the food supplies, the beds, the medicine, the space. She watched as dragonglass came out of the forge as caps for palisades, as the caltrops spread out near the stakes, as arrowheads and axes and clubs. She monitored the digging of the trench, glad to listen to Lord Royce's ongoing assessments of Winterfell's defenses. She even accommodated the castle's unwanted guests, eager to usher them from her home as soon as the dead were taken care of.

Only, the dead have taken care of the Dothraki. In a matter of moments, all but a few of the horsemen have vanished.

"Stick 'em with the pointy end," says Arya, breezily confident to the naked eye. To Sansa's eyes, she's being...bracing, with anxiousness fluttering under her words like a school of fish below the surface of a pond. It's something Arya lets her _see_ , a testament to the flourishing trust that's developed between them since Littlefinger bled to death in the Great Hall. But somehow...they're long past goodbyes, or simply vulnerable yet again to the familiar tide of fear and change and odds shifting out of their favor. She lost Arya in King's Landing and nearly lost her again in Winterfell; Sansa is grimly used to losing, losing, losing. Having Jon and Bran and Arya back always seemed rather too good to be true. Maybe it was.

"Arya—"

 _Don't do that_ , Sansa said, when tensions simmered. _Say what you mean_. Sansa should follow her own advice. She only just got Arya back and now...

"Go," Arya urges, stern as Father, and then there is nothing left, not even time, for Sansa to do anything else but obey.

* * *

The nearest guards seal Sansa into the crypts, making no notice of her tears beyond strained, commiserating nods.

It's better this way, Sansa knows; she can't offer any help to them. She isn't equipped. All she can give to the people alongside her is...the truth.

She hesitates near the refugees and servants, though. They look terrified. Is the truth actually worth telling if it will only frighten them further?

Lord Varys eyes her, a familiar face from King's Landing and clearly an old hand at sieges. Missandei's survey of Sansa is an uneasy thing, searching her face for the answers that can't be offered until the battle is over, if it ends in favor of the living. All Tyrion needs is a glance before he uncaps his flask and starts drinking. Sitting quietly while others fight and die...Sansa is as accustomed to waiting out wars as she is to losing family.

There was wisdom in Arya's words. Staying above would only force others to die—to die _earlier_ —protecting her.

"At least we're already in a crypt," Lord Varys muses.

 _Our crypts_ , Sansa can't help but think, finding some pride in that. If she has to die anywhere, let it be here. _This is a Stark place._

"If we were up there..." Tyrion's fidgety. He enjoys command. He likes being involved. Being a Hand twice over has given him a taste for respect. They're alike in this way, Sansa sees. It's hard to be humbled again after responsibility and all its trappings, despite its perils, have come to suit you. "If we were up there," he repeats, restlessly, "we might see something that everyone else is missing. Something that makes a difference."

Varys scoffs.

"What?" Tyrion asks, offended. Sansa watches the exchange, trying to think of it not as a distraction but munitions for the After—the potential future that the greatest army in the world is still fighting for. "Remember the Battle of the Blackwater? I brought us through the Mud Gate."

"And got your face cut in half."

"It _made_ a _difference_." He glances back to the staircase, where only a barred door separates him from the action. "If I was out there right now..."

"You'd die," says Sansa, surprised that _she_ must be the one to pull him down from the clouds. He seemed so worldly when they met again in King's Landing after Father's death, so intelligent when he tried to comfort her after the Red Wedding, when he reminded Sansa that Mother would've wanted her to keep going. It's taken everything Sansa has gone through to see the wisdom in small kindnesses, in surviving, in holding onto what she wants for dear life. Everything she has gone through, from home to King's Landing and back, also lets her see the folly in so much of what he says now that a fantasy warped his good sense. "There's nothing you can do," she adds, trying to force herself to listen to the same words. The Night King and the Army of the Dead are simply beyond what they can handle. Magic and myth aren't the things that steer the game of thrones.

Tyrion moves away from the stairs, but his behavior is petulant. He isn't listening to her or Varys. Not really. That's what made him fall from the image Sansa bought into as girl, the very same facade that Littlefinger peddled until his last breath; his intellect eclipses all others. His own savvy surpasses anyone else's. There is no room to learn when _you_ must _teach_. It will always be this way, she concludes, and that is where they differ.

"You might be surprised at the lengths I'd go to avoid joining the Army of the Dead. I can think of no organization less suited to my talents."

"Witty remarks won't make a difference," she says, arguing with him more out of habit than true feeling. Tyrion Lannister won't change unless he makes an effort to, or sees that it suits his needs. She should save her passion and persistence to protect the Starks, but all the other Starks are scattered around Winterfell, defending the rest of the world from a cataclysm as Sansa sits here and twiddles her thumbs. "That's why we're down here," Sansa adds, fighting the cascade of fear that will certainly drown her if she lets it. It is easiest to be matter-of-fact, cold, and calm, a compromise that sits uncomfortably between being afraid and being brave. "None of us can do anything." Tyrion looks disappointed by that, like she's pulling him out of a good dream before sunup. "It's the truth. The most heroic thing we can do now is to...look the truth in the face."

Sansa has stared down _truth_ more times than she can count in the years since she left Winterfell. Holding Joffrey's pleasure at her suffering at bay while her father's head rotted on the Traitor's Walk; meeting Cersei's challenges of loyalty with obedience, even as Robb won and won and won and lost; deciphering the depth of Petyr Baelish's interest in her and her mother; even staying alive as Ramsay's captive while the North looked elsewhere was a certainty, a stubborn plight, a hope that she refused to abandon. _Truth_ was Brienne's integrity, Jon's sincerity, Bran's insights, and Arya's courage. _Truth_ was looking at all of life's mysteries and madness and standing firm against them. It's all she can do, so she does.

Sometimes, Sansa meets the truth with lies. They serve her purposes, hid her intentions, keep her foes confused...

 _Winterfell is yours, Your Grace_. Lie.

 _I should've thanked you the moment you arrived_. Lie. 

_He loves you, you know that_. Lie?

 _Truth_ was also studying the things in the world that did not make sense, like the Army of the Dead, like the dragons, like her feelings surrounding Jon. She stared that truth in the face for so long that by the time she unraveled it, pored over the pieces and sewed it all back together, she was asking Jon why he bent the knee, wondering why he dared bring a queen trying for the Iron Throne into his own kingdom, and seeing that he fulfilled a promise of coming back home—and to her—just as easily as he became a new man. If Sansa stared long enough, perhaps she would discover why Jon dismissed the crown he was given, why he could fly a _dragon_ , why he asked for her faith in him but offered little else in return.

She has her suspicions about the crown. There's a war to fight, though, and crowns and knee bending are the last thing anyone is thinking about.

Trusting in truths she doesn't understand is difficult; understanding the truth of her feelings for Jon was even harder.

It _is_ lucky that they are in a crypt. Sansa Stark will take her awful, disgusting, twisted secret right into her own grave. It's quite convenient.

"Maybe we should've stayed married," Tyrion ventures, and Sansa remembers what she _can_ do: ready herself for the aftermath, if one exists.

"You were the best of them." The bar she sets is lower than it's ever been before. Whoever she marries, Sansa only wishes not to be hurt.

That _is_ true. It's also true that Tyrion likes being flattered. This is fighting for the Starks, too, in the way she knows best. Courtesies, however cold, go a long way. She wonders if he bought it, and feels only mildly guilty when his brow smooths out, amusement overshadowing his trepidation.

"What a terrifying thought," he jokes, undoubtedly comparing himself to all of her suitors. She softens her smile further, encouraging him.

"It wouldn't work between us," she has to admit, unable to ignore her conscience entirely. She can die with _some_ integrity if she speaks to Tyrion like this, with time running out and nowhere left to go. Should everyone survive the night, she'll have prepared for the next war off the cuff.

He's crestfallen, or drunker than she expected. Men really _are_ easily manipulated. "Why not?"

 _I'm more like your sister than you think_.

"The dragon queen." She puts one truth out there for all in the crypts to see, as she did to Daenerys herself. Life getting shorter by the minute, and Sansa's tired of the unsaid misunderstanding that the North's autonomy isn't worth addressing. "Your divided loyalties would become a problem."

"Yes," Missandei says, interrupting, "without the dragon queen there would be no problem at all. We'd be dead already."

 _Every possible series of events_ is _happening_ , Petyr advised. _All at once. Live that way, and nothing will surprise you_.

They might've died already...but they hadn't. Nevertheless, Sansa drops the subject. Better to rekindle a friendship than to make another enemy.

They already had so many enemies, Jon warned. If there is an aftermath, a new war, a world without the Night King, Sansa will be ready for it.

* * *

The group's been sitting in near silence for hours when the first screech comes. Then the screams. Then the door, rattling like rusty irons.

"Open the door!"

Sansa can't help herself; she stands, approaching the staircase like Tyrion to simply stare and wonder what is best, what is right, what to _do_.

"Let us in!"

"Milady!"

"Lady Stark, the door!"

" _Please_! The door!"

She's sure that is the voice of the guard who let her inside just hours earlier. She gulps, stares, waits, and frets. There's nothing else Sansa can offer, no balm or reprieve. A younger Sansa might've led the group in a prayer, in a hymn, in a sweet song, like she did among the other women during the Blackwater. Then, Cersei only drank like Tyrion drinks now, perhaps smartly so. This isn't a battle that lends leniency to the losers; if the Night King wins and the Long Night devours Westeros, he won't shelter her with honor as a hostage like Stannis Baratheon might have, had he succeeded against the Lannisters. If Sansa opens the door and admits the pair of frightened, innocent guards, the truth she must stare in the face is becoming one of the dead. Her, Tyrion, Varys, Missandei, Gilly, Little Sam...they will all die if she unbars that door even an inch, without doubt.

If they sing, the dead will almost certainly hear. That would make a younger Sansa so _sad_. She adored singing.

Drawing in a breath, Sansa makes the hard choice, and stays still. She watched Father make the hard decisions and saw the deep lines it dug into his face even before becoming Robert's Hand; she looks at Jon and sees his shoulders buckling like beams in the broken tower under the weight of his responsibilities. She thinks that her own duties have made a similar impact over the past few months; there are days where she feels nothing but cold, inside and out. _The North is yours_ , Jon had said, and Sansa had taken it into her arms, refusing to even kneel in spite of the strain.

 _The pack survives_ , Father had said. Everyone around her, for the time being, is part of the pack. Her pack. _Her_ pack, _her_ people, _her_ crypts, _her_ home, _her_ decision. She forces herself to listen as penance, however. She's sentenced those men to die, and suffer, too. It's the least she can do.

The screams stop abruptly. The screeches fade much slower. Sansa blinks away her tears.

"Wine?" Tyrion murmurs into the quiet, into the gloom, and extends the flask in her direction.

"None for me, my lord," she answers when she can, polite as always, and returns to her seat.

* * *

More waiting. More hours to wonder and worry. More crashes, roars, and screaming. If she has to guess, she would say they are losing.

Idly, Sansa wishes she moved some paperwork or embroidery into the crypts before all this happened. She'd write Robett Glover a nasty letter for a maester to find in the ruins of Winterfell in the years to come, the severity of the situation removing any need to be nice or accommodating with an oathbreaker. She'd send Cersei Lannister a missive, congratulating her on staying out of the war that will doom the North to its destiny. She'd knit Arya and Bran more clothes, or simply mend the clothes that they unthinkingly tear during all their adventures. She'd stitch up something nice for Theon, something that wasn't salt-stained or grimy or stolen, so he would truly know that he mattered to Sansa in so many ways. She'd make something worthy of a king for Jon, inlaid with direwolves and all the things Sansa can never say to him in the stark, unforgiving light of day.

_Do you have any faith in me at all?_

Her answer felt like she had shouted it to him from the bottom of well, choking on more lies than truths. _You know I do._

She should've _said_ something. She's let so many opportunities pass her by. Jon would be sweet. He'd talk her out of these thoughts that festered since he kissed her forehead on the battlements and bowed low as he left, covered in snow and unwittingly resembling the king of a song, a kind king that kept her safe and made her smile and behaved so bravely and gently, like Father promised the man who married her someday would do.

The man she wants this time is just as bad a choice for her. Not that her presumptions mattered, however. It was already too late.

Still the slow learner, she reminds herself, and studies her hands.

* * *

More rattling. Louder now. This time, the noise comes from _within_ the crypts.

Gilly gasps.

A body bashes its way out of its tomb. It's somebody. A Stark ancestor. It's both alive and dead, snarling like its brethren above.

Tyrion drops the flask. Her eyes widen. She's cleverer than this! Shouldn't it have occurred to her that hiding among the dead was a _bad_ idea?

The group shivers like the trees in the wolfswood, rooted to their places. If they stay quiet, if they don't sing, perhaps...it won't notice them.

Covered in dust, the wight cocks its head, blindly searching for errant noises. _Do the dead need eyes to see_? Sansa wonders, getting to her feet with the mindless uncertainty of prey facing down a predator. Varys flinches as another body wakes, bony fingers scrabbling through stone and rot.

A servant near Sansa whimpers, ducking behind a column. The girl with the scarred face straightens her spine.

Little Sam breaks the spell, to Sansa's mingled dismay and pity, and promptly bursts into tears.

 _Fuck_.

The group takes this as an excuse to begin screaming, and the wights accept it as a signal to swarm. Prey and predator; instincts are irresistible.

They're irresistible to her, too. She's scared. She isn't brave like Arya, like Bran, like Jon, like Brienne, like Podrick, like Davos, like Jaime Lannister, like the Dothraki, like the Unsullied and the northmen and Daenerys and the Mormonts and the Vale knights and the free folk and the Night's Watch. She runs, lifting her skirts in her haste and looking desperately for a good hiding spot. She's grown better at hiding over the years; she hid in her rooms in the Red Keep, hid in her head as Ramsay's wife, hid in her heart when Jon came home with a queen that he may have knelt to out of love. Sansa runs as Tyrion shouts encouragements at anyone who will listen to him, trying to find a safe place to spend her last moments. It's a cold comfort that the dead won't hurt her body like her second husband did; they just want her heart to stop beating, not her will to live. She isn't Sansa to them, she's prey. Another soldier. Another girl to kneel to the Night King, another wight to raise with ice blue eyes and no will of her own.

Sansa trips. Of all times to trip, it's the end of the world. She doubts anyone is listening for her manners, so—

"Shit," she mutters, pulling her leg free of rubble and scuttling back like a mouse when she sees her littlest brother staring down at her.

 _Rickon_. His throat's a ruin, despite all of Wolkan's efforts. His curls are only slightly dusty, his clothes are the best she could make in such a short time before he was interred. And he's _taller_. She gapes, stupidly, inching back as the wight approaches, slowly, like they're playing a game.

He always loved games.

"Rickon," she pleads, boots skimming on the stone floor. The wight cocks its head, eyes an otherworldly blue, lighter than any Tully's.

 _The dead aren't the people you love_ , Jon's voice murmurs in her memory. She asked him, once, standing in their favorite spot atop the battlements, unable to sate her curiosity as the North prepared itself for an echo of an ancient battle. What are they like? What do they do? What do they want?

 _They want you to join them. They want you dead. That's all_ , Jon explained. It wasn't clear, even then, if they remembered the living.

 _An eternal night_ , Bran said only yesterday, cloaked in his furs and his confidence. She can't deny his powers any longer. That's the truth.

"Run!" Tyrion demands, giving Sansa the warning she needs to rouse herself. Sansa scrambles to her feet, pulling out the dagger.

Rickon gnashes his teeth, losing the blank indifference of his corpse, and charges. It's fast. Sansa's slower, but her dress does exactly what it's supposed to—it stops him from touching her skin. White fingers digging like nails into her arm, legs kicking and stomping and jabbing, he tries to pin her down. She does all she can do, ungracefully and unheroically. Hands shaking like leaves, she stabs him in the face, pointy-end first.

Rickon screeches, giving Sansa the chance to wriggle free and knock over the torch, setting the wight ablaze. It screams, starting to flail about.

Another hand yanks her sideways, but it's only Tyrion pulling her to safety. They huddle behind Father's tomb, their pants unheard over the din.

"The hospitalities of Winterfell," Tyrion muses with a shaky laugh, finally getting the fight he was longing for. Sickened, she closes her eyes.

"Grumpkins and snarks, they said," she replies, not managing a smile herself. King's Landing laughed at Jeor Mormont's warning. How wrong that was. How _small_ that was. At times, even she doubted, and now...now, Sansa is watching the Starks rise again, just not in the way she wanted.

Against their backs, Father's tomb begins to rattle.

She knows there may be survivors. She also knows the dead outnumber this crypt pack of hers, and that this fight with Tyrion is merely a delay before her own death. A stopgap. What was that thing that Father always used to say? Not the horseshit one. Not the importance of looking a man you sentenced to die in the eye. Not the adage about the pack, either. Not even the Stark words. She thinks it must be a truism of his own. The only time a man could be brave was when he was afraid? _Yes_. That's the one. She can be both afraid and brave. Scared and brimming with courage.

She should've comforted them all. Soothed away their worries. Forced herself to speak up for the last time. Why didn't she _say_ anything?

The group may survive. Maybe they won't. That little girl with the scarred face may be the only one who scrapes her way out of this mess alive. She can be the one to tell the story, Sansa determines. Let her tell the truth about Sansa someday. Let her tell the tale of Lady Stark in the Winterfell crypts, making the hard choices. Let them be say Lady Stark died defending her people. Fought for her people, _with_ her people.

No one will ever hear the tale of Lady Stark falling in love with the King in the North, but that's for best. Some truths are better left buried.

She opens her eyes when another earsplitting screech bounces off the walls, putting any awful thing she's ever heard to shame.

Tyrion raises her free hand to his lips and kisses it. Is he thinking of someone else, as she is? Shae? The dragon queen? Or simply Sansa?

Finally sailing on the same course on the world's last night, they brace themselves. Sansa raises her dagger. Tyrion points to the felled torch.

"Shall we?" He asks.

"After you, my lord," Sansa agrees, polite again, and inters her doubts and dread with Rickon. Then, they stumble right back into the fray.

* * *

They work as a team.

Sansa is ideally placed to stun; Tyrion is deft with the torch to finish the wights off. It does sadden her to refer to the old Starks as wights, but needs must. She hopes wherever they _really_ are, that they understand, that they're _proud_. Winter is here, and the ancient enemy waits for no one.

They're not actually very good at this, though. In fact, they're downright terrible.

Sansa is slow. Sansa has no skill. Sansa doesn't know what she's _doing_.

Tyrion is overzealous with the flames. Fighting any longer with a wight wearing a burned helmet and armor and her sleeve would've caught fire.

The cramped quarters are awful to maneuver around in.

She saves a little girl from a head-to-toe gutting, but can't make it in time to extricate the girl's brother from the hungry shadows.

The people nearby are either trying to escape or getting _eaten_. They try to stop all they can, but they can only do so much.

She and Tyrion and the other fighters can't do _enough_.

Torches and candles are setting cobwebs ablaze, but it's somehow getting darker in the tunnels, like the wights are swallowing the light itself.

It's too much. The calls are getting closer and closer. Brushes with death are becoming swathes of blood and gore. Sansa can hardly keep up.

Varys and Gilly and Missandei have many children in an alcove; it only takes a glance to see that she must keep the wights away from that spot.

She's more afraid than brave now. It's like the sun is setting on her will to keep going. She doesn't know how Robb jumped into battle so often, how Father marched for Robert Baratheon again and again, how Jon fought and fought and died and fought and _still_ didn't hesitate to defend the castle.

Father can't escape the sepulcher, to her relief. It's a short-lived thing. Brandon Stark, garroted throat in all, is terrifying enough.

"Buggering hells," Tyrion wheezes, bloodied, dodging Brandon's claws, and spared only by Varys's timely intervention. "He's furious!"

 _Wouldn't you be?_ Sansa doesn't say, too tired to be petty, too frightened to care. Avoiding her uncle's snarling maw keeps her plenty occupied.

This is her home, but she's still frightened. She'll die as herself, all pieces left intact, but for how long? How long until she's one of _them_?

A whole generation of Starks have broken free of their graves now. Eight thousand years of Starks are buried in the crypts, the part of her with an attention to detail recalls as she and Tyrion are backed into a corner of low strategic value, if she translates his groan of frustration correctly.

The last night is a horror, she realizes, trying to control her breathing. The songs are never like this.

"It's been an honor, my lady," Tyrion blurts out. Her words will not be kind, so she stays silent. She's always been too good at being silent.

Dagger shaking in her sweaty hand and her heart racing like a sand steed, Sansa readies herself for the true _End_...but it never comes, to her shock. Towering over them, Brandon Stark instead crumples like a felled tree, dead and departed all over again. All the reanimated corpses fall right where they stand like abandoned puppets, bones unpleasantly crackling like thrown dice. The screams of her pack die and trail off into whimpers. The torches are the only signs of life in the crypts besides the cries and prayers of the wounded—the sparking and snapping.

"Oi," the scarred girl whispers after an eternity, cheeks red with blood and clutching a sword she stole from one of the statues. "Is that it, m'lady?"

"I...I don't know," Sansa admits, muddled and dizzy. She wonders if she ought to swap the dagger for the sword. "I-I suppose...I could go look."

"That wouldn't be wise, my lady," Missandei urges, alarmed.

"We should be sure," Varys adds, wincing around a black eye.

Gilly nods. Other voices in the pack squeak out their assents. It's all very northern, even pleasant, debating and deliberating as a group.

"Fuck all of that," Tyrion proclaims, forever the intruding Lannister, and stirs from his post. " _I'll_ look."

He hesitates on the staircase, dazed and exhausted but likely frightened, too. Sansa listens to the unbarring of the door. Gulps. Frets. Waits.

"It's all right," Tyrion's voice calls down to them, after what feels like another century of silence. "It's finished."

* * *

Last night, Sansa led this group into the crypts. Today, she also leads some of them out. The rest...rest. In a crypt. Lucky and convenient.

The outside light is blinding, the brightest the dawn has been in years. The air is the opposite, though; it's rotten and makes her stomach churn.

Winterfell stands, but nearly all of Sansa's repairs are destroyed. Half of the stables. Most of the forge's roof. The stakes. Bran's ramps. And that says nothing of the bodies. There are so many bodies that Sansa is afraid to count them. She makes herself look without seeing, as she did with Father on the Traitor's Walk. Familiar faces poke out of the rubble. Lyanna Mormont. Some of Royce's knights. A dozen Karstarks. More Unsullied.

She should go looking for Bran and Arya and Jon, but she's rooted to the spot, getting her bearings. No wonder Jon did nothing for a week after the Battle of the Bastards. War is exhausting. The group siphons off into smaller pieces, the first being the scarred girl with Gilly and Little Sam, eager to find Ser Davos. Varys and Missandei withdraw to find their queen, as does Tyrion with a little prodding. He's loath to leave her behind, but Sansa mumbles her insistence and sends him away with as much kindness as she can. She has to find...someone. Anyone. She feels more wrung out than washing, closer to sleep than sadness. She has all her life to be sad. They survived. _She_ survived. The Long Night is over. The real work can begin.

She hasn't gotten far before she's snatched into what's left of the forge and swept into a familiar embrace reeking of blood and old leather and _Jon_.

"Sansa," Jon breathes, letting her go only to pull her right back in, like the distance has been plaguing him, too. "It's over. The Night King's dead."

If someone told her that Jon Snow would say _that_ , then _kiss_ her bloodied hands, she'd ask if they had tumbled down the stairs recently.

Tyrion's kiss gave Sansa a push to fight the dead.

Jon's gives her an off-kilter dream, a taste of something that is as out of reach as magic and myth and the dragons soaring over Winterfell.

_Why aren't you happy? What do you want that you do not have?_ Something too wrong to be true or right or good, for anyone.

A truth best kept a secret, and left among the dead, where its wretched self belongs. 

"We should talk," she tells him, quietly. Maybe it isn't too late to say something. Maybe the best time to say what she feels is _soon_ , before the world as she knows it spins back into her grasp and the next war begins in earnest. She has her munitions for the after, a foot in the door and a crown in the ring, whether Jon wears it or not, but no absolution. No composure. None of the clearheadedness that lets her see the stupid mistakes of men and avoid them. The day's come. The Long Night ended. Thousands died. He's _alive_. So is she. She should say what she means, once and for all.

 _It's too great a risk_ , Sansa told Jon before he left for Dragonstone. Jon went anyway, both scared and brave. Shouldn't she do the same?

Still so close that their breaths mingle, closer to Sansa than he's been in months, he nods. The dawn makes these moments between them feel longer, more laborious and heavy. "Aye," says Jon, his voice holding so much back that she wonders what he's hiding from her this time. "We will."

Some secrets, Sansa is beginning to learn, are not so easily buried.

**Author's Note:**

> I was kinda disappointed that Sansa and Tyrion's scene fighting wights was cut, so I wrote this. I read a lot of meta on the subject, and it's really cool to see so many sides of it (why cut the scene in a feature length episode, why make Sansa fight in the first place when it isn't her strength, why not resurrect a familiar Stark face, why not do the unbelievably obvious parallel to the Blackwater). Anyhow, I tried to play with all the arguments, fill in some blanks, and toy with the canon material, too.
> 
> I also liked the season's suggestion (which I also found in a lot of metas) of pairing Sansa and her 'love interests' (Theon, Tyrion) in various scenes with callbacks to some telling Jon/Sansa moments. It makes writing the introspection really fun. :)
> 
> Thanks so much for reading!


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